Saturday, October 2, 2010

Tae Kim is fucking stupid

It dawned on me that if Abbie hadn’t pointed it out, I would never have thought of Other M that way. I simply didn’t have the necessary perspective to see the larger implications of the narrative decisions Team Ninja and Nintendo had made. I began to wonder how differently GamePro’s review would’ve turned out, had I assigned the game to a woman instead of doing it myself. For that matter, how different would reviews of games like Mirror's Edge, Heavenly Sword, and Guardian of Light have been under the same conditions?

Wow, that was really stupid.

I absolutely fucking hate this backwards-ass notion that somehow women are able to bring a new light to all sorts of angles of everything by virtue of having vaginas. Being female is not a perspective. It is an identity. It may affect your outlook but Other M's portrayal of Samus has nothing to do with gender. Gender politics, yes, but not gender roles.

I mean, sure you might have a higher chance of meeting women who agree with the sexist portrayal of Samus, but that doesn't mean it's a blanket statement you can tack onto the female populous. I'm sure there are women who are sexist and think rape jokes are funny.

It's especially ridiculous considering you can look at, ohhh, I dunno, Gamepad Dojo and see me and Noncon both tearing it a new one. Or even Yahtzee looked at it and went, "That's pretty sexist." We are not women - this is just our perspective. You don't have to be gay to see homophobia. Aggie is feminist and looked right at the sexism and called it out. Other reviewers did not see it.

Even this is probably giving it more attention than it deserves considering a few paragraphs in he basically runs off the rails and talks about how "these things need to be considered equally" and "you don't always need these things in a game review" etc etc etc. It's just outright ridiculous that he asks if gender affects reviews, and he says yes because everything affects reviews. Well yes that's true...but you haven't really answered the question. Reminds me of when you accuse someone of stealing and they talk about how all property is theft.

It's just a backhanded-ass sexism to treat women gamers as though they have this entirely different set of credentials based on being born with a vagina. We're going to get a lot further on in our collective chosen hobby if we stop treating women differently - not better or worse, but differently - and just keep in mind at all times that they're gamers like us.

1 comment:

Good deal bro. Think I might wanna rant on this too. Dead rising 2...weird how it has like, woman in fridge, odd/sexist portrayals, then one of the best modeled female characters I've ever seen (and a mega man ref).